As of this week, I'm starting off conversation practice for English, Urdu and Punjabi on iTalki: If you'd like to practice your conversation skills, please hop onto italki to sign upand book a lesson.

The idea of studying a new language is difficult. The most common reasons I've heard from people is that it takes too much time, it's too expensive, and that they can't learn another language. More on that later.

But why not build on the skills you do have? In Pakistan's Sindh province, for example, Sindhi is a mandatory subject for exams administered by the government. But - based totally from my experience - very few non-native speakers study or interact with Sindhi once they've left school, turning a skill dormant. One of the things that I am hugely thankful for is that I was able to keep up with Sindhi after school. I used Sindhi while reporting on the Sindh legislature, and as a result of continuously interacting with the language, I could read documents and newspapers, watch TV shows and do basic interviews in Sindhi. The fact that so many of us in/from the developing world are bilingual or trilingual is a great start to learning languages. Why do we let these skills go dormant?

So shake it* off and start with practicing a language you do know; whether it's your parents' Punjabi, your grandparents' Gujarati, or your school-level Sindhi, or the Arabic you learned to study the Quran. (Here's a great list of resources to get you started) These language bases are hugely important to start learning a new language: Urdu and Arabic for Farsi, English for German and so on. Think about it: that's one more skill you can add to your resume, one more edge you have, one more way to interact with a different province or region, and more importantly: get a whole new perspective.

It*: lethargy/laziness/the inability to make time yet spend hours scrolling through Instagram